Driving back from a warm and bird-filled outing on Beech Hill this morning, I passed a set of lush, velvety green farm fields. In what must have been a wet pocket in the corner of one, thousands of buttercups clustered together to form a glowing yellow bowl of flowers in all that green. The next field contained a similar buttercup hollow. The effect was stunning and surprising, for both the numbers of flowers all massed together as for their cumulative brightness. The little yellow faces of those many blossoms dazzled the surrounding landscape.

As kids we held buttercups under each other chins to see if the yellow would reflect, meaning we liked butter. Those buttercups holding themselves up to the chin of the sky, where the yellow sun shines back--what does that mean?  Does the cosmos like butter too? And why shouldn't it? What scene is more bucolic than a lush pasture in which soft-eyed, butter-producing (grass fed, hormone- and antibiotic-free) cows graze placidly amid the yellow lights of buttercups under a perfect blue sky?

What's up, buttercups?
Galaxy of yellow suns
swirls in a green sky.